Although ‘Home Automation’ first started to automatically control home appliances from somewhere in the house or from a remote place, the appliances were not connected to each other, and one had to deal with each appliance individually by using telephone or infrared rays. Recently however, all electronic apparatuses are networked together with help of a communication means, and a home network system for integrative control on the network through a controller is going to be available to the public in no time.
As depicted in FIG. 1, the home network system includes a communication bus for interconnecting a plurality of home appliances, such as, refrigerator, washing machine, personal computer (PC), etc.
Particularly, FIG. 1 illustrates a case in which every apparatus' micom has a serial communication function and is directly connected to the communication bus. If the micom does not have the serial communication function or uses a power line as communication line, a separate communication module is needed to configure the home network.
As mentioned before, the home network generally includes a controller for controlling network system. However, now that almost every house has a personal computer, one can simply install an application program for controlling the network system into the personal computer and use that as network controller.
The problem with the conventional home network system was that it could control appliances only through a specific type of controller.
In other words, regardless of the facts that every house has a plurality of personal computers and each computer configures wired or wireless network together, the conventional technology still required to control appliances only through a computer that is designated as the controller of the home network system. Hence, one cannot control a wanted apparatus through another computer.